Well, I finally dished out and purchased a brand new MacBook Pro. And I am amazed at the simplicity of the OSX OS. Initially I was a little worried at the lack of keyboard support. This ended up being a relearning for me as I have been heavily reliant on the ALT key coming from the Windows world.
I am running both of my work and development windows VM’s inside the Mac using VMWare Fusion. This is a truly surreal experience that blurs the line between where the Mac ends and Windows begins.
I installed QuickSilver a couple of days ago, and I finally see what all of the fuss was about. QuickSilver is an amazing utility that is an absolute must have for a keyboard junkie like myself. Each of my VM’s has a copy of launchy and slickrun installed. One of the things that I found out was that once I had launched a program once in a VM, it was accessible using QuickSilver!! This means that I can now reboot my Mac, use QuickSilver to launch my VM’s and then furthermore use QuickSilver to launch apps within those VM’s. I will have to do a screencast soon to demonstrate some of this stuff!!
All in all, my first couple of days running on a Mac have been thoroughly impressive, and I look forward to the learning that I will have to go through in the next little while.
FYI: My vm’s seem to run much faster in Fusion on the Mac, than they did on either XP or Vista. I am guessing at the fact that the OS overhead is much less with OSX vs. Vista or XP.